Media management systems are becoming increasingly popular among consumers of entertainment media who need assistance in managing their ever-growing collections of CD's, DVD's, MP3 files and media-playing equipment. Media management systems interface with a variety of sources of media. For example, a media management system may receive media from different CD-changers, different DVD-changers, the Internet, a CD player, a DVD player, a personal computer and a hard disk drive. Media management systems also interface with a variety of media players. For example, the same media management system may play media on a monitor, a television, and on different audio receivers. Media management systems are also typically able to display information about the media available on the connected sources of media on a user interface. The user interface allows the user to communicate instructions to play selected pieces of media.
Developers of media management systems aim to interface with as wide a variety of media sources as possible. Different media sources make media available in forms that provide different capabilities for enhancing the user experience. Web-sites on the Internet offer users the convenience of downloading music or other audio as MP3 files. Video works and music are now available on different types of discs such as DVD, CD, Super-Audio CD (SACD), WAV, MP3, DVD-Audio, etc. offering the user options such as choices in surround modes available to the user. In this regard, audio/video receivers now have a variety of inputs to allow a user to connect alternative media sources. A user may connect media sources, audio receivers and video players to a media management system to take advantage of the many options available to experience the media.
Providing such variety of capabilities imposes on the user the burden of learning and understanding the capabilities available on the user's media management system. Moreover, the user typically manually configures the manner in which a selected piece of media will be played each time it is played. For example, a user may direct an SACD disc to a 6-channel analog input on the receiver when playing an SACD disc. Then, if the user wishes to listen to an MP3 file, the user may manually configure the media management system to direct the output to a 2-channel input on the receiver. Such manual configuration for each type of media source becomes burdensome to the user.
Based on the foregoing, a need exists for automatically configuring receivers to play media using sound and video modes according to characteristics of the media.